ADVANCE FOR USE SUNDAY, MAY 12, 2013 AND THEREAFTER – Former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi sits next to his book: “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” at his home in Pasadena, Calif. on Thursday, March 7, 2013. Bugliosi embarked on his book expecting to vindicate the Warren Commission. What he didn’t expect was for it to balloon into 1,650-pages. The 78-year-old lawyer blames the conspiracy theorists. He says, he responded to all of their allegations. “It’s a bottomless pit. It never, ever ends. And if my publisher … didn’t finally step in and say, ‘Vince, we’re going to print,’ I’d still be writing the book.” (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

On the very day John F. Kennedy died, a cottage industry was born. Fifty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, it’s still thriving.

Its product? The “truth” about the president’s assassination.

“By the evening of November 22, 1963, I found myself being drawn into the case,” Los Angeles businessman Ray Marcus wrote in “Addendum B,” one of several self-published monographs he produced on the assassination. For him, authorities were just too quick and too pat with their conclusion.

“The government was saying there was only one assassin; that there was no conspiracy. It was obvious that even if this subsequently turned out to be true, it could not have been known to be true at that time.”

Most skeptics, including Marcus, didn’t get rich by publishing their doubts and theories — and some have even bankrupted themselves chasing theirs. But for a select few, there’s been good money in keeping the controversy alive.

Best-selling books and blockbuster movies have raked in massive profits since 1963. And now, with the 50th anniversary of that horrible day in Dallas looming, a new generation is set to cash in.

Of course, the Warren Commission officially concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone — and issued 26 volumes of documents to support that determination. But rather than closing the book on JFK’s death, the report merely served as fuel for an already kindled fire of doubt and suspicion.

Since then, even government investigators have stepped away from the lone assassin theory. In 1978, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations ended its own lengthy inquiry by finding that JFK “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

That panel acknowledged it was “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” But armed with mountains of subsequently released documents, there has been no shortage of people willing to offer their own conclusions.

Among the leading suspects: Cuban exiles angry about the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Mafiosi enraged by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s attacks on organized crime; the “military-industrial complex,” worried about JFK’s review of war policy in Vietnam.

One theorist even floated the notion that Kennedy’s limousine driver shot the president — as part of an effort to cover up proof of an alien invasion.

Anything but that Oswald, a hapless former Marine, was in the right place at the right time, with motive and opportunity to pull off one of the most audacious crimes in American history.

“As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and the mind abhors chance,” says Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society and author of “The Believing Brain,” a book on how humans seem hardwired to find patterns in disparate facts and unconnected, often innocent coincidences.

Polls underscore the point.

About 6 in 10 Americans say they believe multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, while only one-fourth think Oswald acted alone, according to an AP-GfK survey done in mid-April. Belief in a conspiracy, Login to read more